Clinicians in many healthcare organizations are more frequently being tasked to treat a greater number of patients. Additionally, clinicians must often perform a wide variety of care-related activities for each of their patients. These activities are typically based on a clinician's role. For example, activities for a nurse may include administering medications, performing patient assessments, collecting specimens from patients, and providing general patient care. Given the increased number of patients that clinicians are treating, it is often difficult for clinicians to manage the various activities associated with each of their patients. This increased case load and the accompanying stress can result in a greater number of medical errors.
A variety of computer-based solutions have been developed to assist clinicians in the care of patients. Such solutions provide clinicians with access to patient information and allow clinicians to manage patient activities. However, many of these solutions have not been well constructed. In particular, some solutions present too much information to the clinician, forcing the clinician to sift through the data to find desired information. This can be a time-consuming process for clinicians. As a result, many clinicians resort to a manual process of recording the most vital patient information, for example, on a note card that they carry around with them.
In some cases, current computer-based solutions require clinicians to move between various different applications to find patient information, view activities, and document completion of activities. As such, clinicians typically cannot maintain a context of the activities they need to perform during a particular shift. Further, if clinicians are interrupted while performing a workflow using a current solution, the clinician typically must start the workflow from the beginning when returning to complete the workflow.